Ajay Banga, the World Bank Group's president, stated that India has joined the United States and the United Kingdom among the institution's foremost contributors of privately mobilised capital, while also setting out a plan to expand the organisation's critical minerals operations fivefold over the next five years.

Speaking at the World Bank Annual Meeting plenary session in Bangkok, Banga told attendees that the institution drew investment from participants across 110 countries during the previous year, with three nations accounting for the largest share of those contributions. He added that capital had been gathered from investors spanning that same 110-country reach. The three nations credited with taking a front position in that effort were the United States, the United Kingdom, and India.

Private capital mobilisation, Banga noted, had expanded to roughly $112 billion in the most recent fiscal year, up from around $35 billion in fiscal 2022. When the World Bank Group's own capital commitments are counted alongside external contributions, the combined funding pool reached beyond $230 billion, drawing on a blend of public money and privately sourced investment directed at development work.

Funding mobilisation, he noted, had come close to tripling across lower-middle-income nations, reached roughly four times its previous level in upper-middle-income economies, and grew by more than double throughout Africa. Across the world's lowest-income economies, roughly $3 billion in privately sourced capital was mobilised, a figure that points to the persistent difficulty of drawing commercial investors toward those markets.

Banga outlined a target to expand the World Bank's portfolio in critical minerals fivefold over the next five years, describing the sector as a growing priority for manufacturing, infrastructure, and emerging technologies. Formal agreements between the institution and multilateral development bank partners — described as the first of their kind at country level — were established with the aim of helping lower-income economies strengthen home-grown industries and retain a larger portion of the wealth flowing from their mineral reserves.

Twenty nations were put forward as prospective partners in the framework Banga outlined. The programme is designed to push resource-producing nations beyond raw extraction, targeting domestic processing, manufacturing growth, added-value output, and employment generation within those economies.

Banga drew on the broader global employment challenge to place the strategy in context. Demographic modelling puts approximately 1.2 billion young people on a path toward employment entry over the next fifteen years, while job creation in that same period is estimated at roughly 400 million openings — leaving a projected gap of around 800 million, a figure analysts treat as a conditional projection rather than a predetermined outcome.

"That path ahead is not one we are bound to follow," he told the audience.

To address that challenge, Banga outlined a World Bank approach built around three interlocking tools: infrastructure spending, changes to regulatory frameworks, and financial mechanisms designed to lower the risk exposure facing private-sector investors. Of the $40 billion directed toward infrastructure, healthcare, education, and skills development over the previous year, roughly a third of all public-sector funding went toward strengthening policy frameworks and institutional structures.

Six multilateral development banks are jointly drafting shared benchmarks for evaluating, bundling, and transferring investments to institutional buyers — a process that, according to Banga, could release capital for fresh development work.